“What if school, as we used it on a daily basis, signaled not the name of a process or institution through which we could be indoctrinated, not a structure through which social capital was grasped and policed, but something more organic, like a scale of care. What if school was the scale at which we could care for each other and move together. In my view, at this moment in history, that is really what we need to learn most urgently.”

–Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

there’s this, I will say: for a person who sets off on a difficult road, at first the pleasant, crooked country lanes and rustic byways branching off from it in all directions remind him that he can change his course at any time. “If I get tired I will take the next one to the right, or to the left, or go down some road that comes after that.” But if this person keeps following the same path, eventually these intersecting forks and branches become unwanted distractions, and after a while he doesn’t even take account of them. Sooner or later, he reaches a point of no return. After that he cannot turn away from what his particular, chosen road presents him without losing his sense of who he is, because he now understands that he has chosen it, and, in a mysterious way, the road has also chosen him.

• “I did not know Anna Politkovskaya” by Gary Indiana

The Road Not Taken
BY ROBERT FROST
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

from sarah ahmed’s “orientations: toward a queer phenomenology” - “i have always been struck by the phrase ‘a path well trodden’ a path is made by repeatedly passing over ground. we can see the path as a trace of past journeys, made out of footprints, traces of feet that tread and in treading create a line on the ground. when we see the line of the ground before us, we tend to walk on it, as a path clears the way. so we walk on the path as it is before us but it is only before us as an effect of being walked upon. the lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition. to say that lines are performative is to say that we find our way, we know which direction we face, only as an effect of work, which is often hidden from view. so in following the directions, i arrive, as if by magic.”

A Cyborg Manifesto
Ironyis about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tensionof holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is abouthumour and serious play.  A Cyborg Manifesto The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It isoppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. A Cyborg Manifesto No longer structured by the polarity ofpublic and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of socialrelations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer bethe resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other.A Cyborg Manifesto Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save itthrough a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, throughits completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos.A Cyborg Manifesto The cyborg appears in myth precisely where theboundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of peoplefrom other living beings, cyborgs signal distrurbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestialityhas a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.